An Unexpected Journey / Confessions of a Professional Christian

Early April 2007, while in prayer, I felt that God impressed upon me “Start preparing for what I have for you!” I was almost giddy with excitement and hopeful expectation.

I already had what most aspiring ministers and some tech geeks would call a “dream job”. I was the Worship Pastor at a mega-church in the Greater Houston Metropolitan area, and also in charge of creative video production. Pretty cool right? Yeah…..it was…a little. But, you see…things had been tough at work for about seven months or so. Really tough.

So, as you can see, what I felt God whispered to me in prayer was awesome. I just knew that things were about to get better, and I was ready for it.

Easter rolled around and it was awesome! We had prepared an awesome program, arranged and performed some amazing songs. The band and Worship team were in top form. As a special presentation, I sang an old Third Day song along with a video presentation that was very moving. The audience was engaged, moved with emotion, that was what it was all about. All four weekend services went off without a hitch. Now we could relax a little. I took a much needed vacation the following weekend.

Upon returning from vacation, I was re-energized and ready to conquer the world…and ran slam into a brick wall. Difficult church staff meetings and tense closed door sessions with superiors, left me bewildered, hurt and confused.

Wednesday,. May 23rd 2007, I pulled into the church parking lot heading into work. The weekend services had been really good. Tuesday’s staff meeting had been difficult…again. But I was determined that today would be different. I had determined that I would try very hard to not rock the boat.

Upon getting out of my car, grabbing my laptop and brief case, I saw the senior pastor about to walk up the stairs to his second floor office. We exchanged pleasantries, as we always did, and he said, “why don’t you drop your stuff off at your office, grab a cup of coffee, and come up and let’s visit”. We had done this many times. We’ve known each other for well over ten years, most of which had been spent together on staff. Usually we would talk about a lot of nothing. He would ask about the family, I would ask about his kids. We would laugh about the latest joke or funny story we had heard. Sometimes we would talk 70’s rock music, because…we all know it was the last great era of rock and roll music. Most all of the time we would get around to talking about ministry and what God was doing in our church.